1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information aggregation systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods for browsing aggregated historical content.
2. Description of Related Art
Existing news aggregation services (e.g., Google News) search out, and aggregate, news content published on web pages throughout the Internet. These news aggregation services then aggregate the news from thousands of news sources in real time and provide them to users that access news content via the news aggregation service. When using these news aggregation services, recent news articles (e.g., news articles from the past 3 days) are grouped together to form news clusters representing a single “news story” in the news. Specifically, the news clusters are scored based on recency, size, and geographical and topical preferences.
In response to a search query from a user, or when a user browses a newspaper section of the news aggregation service, clusters of news items that match the search query are ranked based on a match between the search query and the clusters of news items and a recency and size associated with the news clusters to produce a relevant and high quality ranking. Based on the ranking, the news aggregation service may present a list of stories, from the aggregated news content, to the user, with each story involving a group of articles from different publications dealing with the same topic. Users may periodically access the news aggregation service to re-enter a search query and view relevant news stories to keep abreast of developments in the news. News article lists that are displayed as a result of the existing news content searching and ranking processes tend to be unwieldy, with, possibly, up to hundreds of news articles being contained in the list. Existing news article lists, thus, can make it difficult for a news browser to ascertain, in an easy fashion, how a news story develops over time.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to implement a news browsing service that enables news browsers to quickly and easily ascertain the progression of one or more news stories over time.